In this day and age, a well-designed website is a key factor that usually makes the difference between a successful business and one that fails to meet its goals.
Websites have the power to impact all levels of the operation, including branding, lead generation, and finding the latest industry trends.
As the entire world is making the final push towards complete digitalization, your website is more important than ever before.
In this article, we will go over the most useful tricks that will help you optimize your site and gain an edge over your competitors.
What is SEO Exactly?
Many people want to know what is SEO exactly and how it affects website ranking.
Well, SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s a process of building a website according to the best industry practices. The goal is to increase website traffic by making it more visible according to the rules put in place by Google’s search engine.
If you manage to tune in your content, pages, website structure, layout, and other details with Google’s rules, you can rank your site higher and thus generate more traffic.
You want to provide a ton of useful, relevant information to attract more customers. You can do that in many different ways, but we’ll get back to that in just a second.
Why You Should Take Website Optimization Seriously
Website optimization is a never-ending process that includes many different practices and areas. The goal of every website optimization project is to improve how a site works and boost customer engagement.
Since Google is the one setting all of the rules, you want to make sure that your website is organized in tune with the latest trends. That will help you increase the overall ranking, generate more leads, increase trust, and provide all kinds of benefits. Here’s a quick look at the most important ones.
- Allowing customers to find your website easier
- Making sure that your brand delivers every promise
- Lead generation
- Better customer engagement and longer browsing time on your website
- Increased conversion rates
- Improved user experience
- Decreased cart abandonment rates
- Better audience targeting
- Identifying weak spots in the operation
- Many others
As you can see, website optimization can help you boost your site’s ranking while improving customer satisfaction and helping you build up a professional reputation.
Let’s take a look at the crucial website optimization considerations.
8 Practical Website Optimization Tips
Website optimization never stops, and no matter how good your site might be, there’s always something you can do to make it even better.
Here are eight of the most practical tips that will help you boost your site’s ranking and improve the overall user experience.
1. Improve Targeting with Useful Content
Sometimes you might feel like Google is trying to undermine your efforts for creating a better user experience, but that’s not how things work.
If your best content isn’t performing as well as it used to, it’s usually due to a changing algorithm. Google updates its search algorithm constantly to improve the user experience and provide prioritized content that offers the best value to a specific targeted audience.
Google uses over 200 different signals to assess the quality of the posted content and rank it.
Google looks for content that fits the page and provides value to every visitor looking for information. Therefore, you should set specific goals and create a content campaign in tune with those same goals.
For example, if you want to boost conversion rates, you should use a technique that guides your visitors toward buying something.
The important thing is to stay true to your goals and optimize the content according to Google’s algorithm to get the most out of every post.
2. Fast Page Loading Speed Is a Must
The bounce rate plays a huge role in your website’s success. Without fast loading speeds, you won’t be able to grow your business and keep your customers happy.
Only 1/100 of a second in extra loading speeds can decrease conversion rates by a whopping 70%! That’s why you have to do everything you can to make your website as fast as possible.
The average page loading speed depends on all kinds of factors, and it’s not the same in every industry. However, you should always try new available methods to make every page load faster.
Use smaller images, get rid of any extra elements you don’t use, and reduce the size of all uploaded files as much as possible.
Most visitors don’t want to wait more than a few seconds to access information, especially mobile users.
Every second counts and your conversion rates will increase if you manage to reduce page loading speeds. It’s that simple.
3. Prioritize Mobile Users
Mobile accounts have generated 54.8% of global website traffic during the first quarter of 2021.
Desktop websites are becoming a thing of the past, which is why you should primarily focus on optimizing your sites for mobile users.
You want to optimize your content for people using a smaller screen to make browsing, reading, and purchasing easier for all mobile users.
Of course, a portion of your traffic will still come from desktop users, but according to the latest stats, the traffic they generate will keep dropping in the future.
Simply put, a fully responsive website design is a must if you want to make your customers happy and generate more traffic.
4. A/B Testing for Better Results
Let’s say that you’ve put a lot of work into creating a highly optimized website. You took the time to pick the right headlines, tune the colors with your brand’s colors, used a modern layout, and do everything else that needs doing.
Even if you’re pleased with the final results, you should know that your impression is subjective. Someone else might think that the site doesn’t look all that good. That’s where A/B testing comes into play.
A/B testing is a process also known as split testing, and it helps you figure out which visual elements (or content) work the best.
Instead of creating only one website design, you can create two or more with different visuals, colors, layouts, and so on. Once all of your websites go live, you can use advanced monitoring tools to see which version has the best results.
Once you pinpoint the winning mixture of features, you can further optimize the user experience.
It’s not a bad idea to hire a website development company in NYC to get some expert guidance and even better results.
5. Provide Outstanding Customer Support
Regardless of what products or services you offer, ensuring that your customers always get the help they need will help you go a long way.
It doesn’t take too much effort to set up a customer support system. There are many advanced software tools designed for that specific use. Most of them allow you to provide constant support through multiple channels.
Having some type of customer service system will boost your conversion rates almost immediately.
Once potential customers know that you’ve got their back, they will purchase without hesitation. Also, if you provide professional help and always show that you’re willing to get things done, cancelations and refunds will go down.
Lastly, when your customers get the help they need, they will be more likely to return and make more purchases in the future.
6. Promote New Products with Special Offers
One of the most effective ways of increasing sales is adding upsells for all visitors who make a purchase. Without them, your customers will only spend money on the items or services they wanted in the first place.
However, if you give your customers the chance to purchase another product at a discount, you will generate more sales.
The process goes like this: a customer comes to a specific product page, decides to make a purchase, goes through the checkout process, and right before they leave, you present a special offer.
Since they’ve already filled out their credit card details and other information, they are only one click away from potentially going along with the special offer.
Even if only a fraction of customers get the special offer, you will double your sales in no time.
7. Update Your Website Regularly
It takes a lot of effort to optimize a website, and right when you think it’s over, Google updates its algorithms, forcing you to make other changes.
The truth is that SEO never stops. If you stop adding new content to your website, it will quickly become outdated, and your traffic will keep dropping.
You want to keep your products and services relevant to attract visitors and provide them with the value they are looking for. Of course, you won’t have to update every feature and detail.
As long as you add new content to your blogs, update broken links, and share the content across social media, you will do just fine.
8. Analyze Traffic Using Advanced Tools
Nothing can tell you more about the state of your website than advanced analytic tools. These software tools are designed to monitor everything that goes on with your website. That includes traffic, customer engagement, the total number of views and impressions, social media network sharing, keyword placement, and so on.
Google Analytics is a must if you want to make well-informed changes to your website.
You can use Google Analytics during the A/B testing phase to see which version performs better. It might take you some time to master how everything works, but you will get all kinds of benefits once you do.
Conclusion
SEO is becoming increasingly complex as new ranking factors change the game every year. That said, as long as you optimize the backbone of your site correctly, you will have a better starting point.
Populate your site with well-written copy to attract the right audience, and don’t forget to improve the loading speeds of every page.
As long as you analyze the performance of your website, you will know what to do to improve conversion rates and improve sales.
Remember, hard work always pays off, so don’t give up, and success will surely follow.
Ellie Northcott is a long-time marketer, currently working as a freelancer in Miami, Florida.
She is also a passionate writer and loves to explore new, innovative and digital news.
In spare time she is an eco activist.